I shall use Tourneur's name to discuss both The Revenger's Tragedy and The Atheist's Tragedy, although the first, published anonymously, is now often claimed as an early work of Middleton. Both are in the Revenge convention. They are close to Marston, though the structure is much more coherent. The temptation scenes in The Revenger's Tragedy are modelled very closely on those of The Malcontent: for this play Tourneur also used the Humorous system of characterisation, and the dual personality of the disguised villain hero, which have been discussed in chapter 2. The characters are ‘distorted to scale’; and Vindice is two characters in one.

The narrative is formalised as well as the characters. Hence some of the incidents which at first sight seem episodic strengthen the main structure of the play, which is an enlarged series of peripeteia. At one extreme, they can produce tragic farce. The play opens with the Duke, an old lecher, condemning his stepson for a rape; it ends with Vindice revealing his crime, and being condemned to death, not so much for the crime itself as because

The narrative illustrates with ingenious variety in how many ways a villain may be hoist with his own petard.